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Celebrated as one of America's great prose stylists, John Updike astonishes us here with the range of subjects he considers. Shrewdly admiring essays on American past masters such as Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, Edmund Wilson, and Dawn Powell take their place beside penetrating assessments of contemporary peers and rivals--John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Martin Amis. Here too are brilliantly original essays on religion and literature, lust and dancing, as well as a revealing selection of pieces about himself and his work. Whether he's writing about photography or film, golf or adultery, Bill Clinton's hair or the sinking of the Titanic, Updike never fails to dazzle or surprise. Generous, learned, and wickedly funny, More Matter is a triumph of style and substance.

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of <i>The New Yorker</i>, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the father of four children and the author of fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, <b>Hugging the Shore</b>, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>

Preface

xix

Large Matters

Matters of State

Freedom and Equality: Two American Bluebirds

3

(13)

The State of the Union, as of March 1992

16

(6)

Letter to a Baby Boomer

22

(3)

The Fifties

25

(5)

Gender and Health

The Disposable Rocket

30

(3)

Women Dancing

33

(4)

Get Thee Behind Me, Suntan

37

(4)

V

41

(1)

Lust

42

(4)

The Song of Solomon

46

(4)

Literature

Religion and Literature

50

(13)

Fiction: A Dialogue

63

(2)

Print: A Dialogue

65

(5)

A Different Ending

70

(2)

The Burglar Alarm

72

(7)

The Glittering City

79

(778)

Geographical, Calendrical, Topical

On the Edge

97

(3)

People Wrapped to Go

100

(2)

One Big Bauble

102

(4)

The Twelve Terrors of Christmas

106

(1)

That Syncing Feeling

107

(2)

Paranoid Packaging

109

(2)

Hostile Haircuts

111

(2)

Glad Rags

113

(1)

Addressing the Scandal Glut

114

(2)

Manifesto

116

(2)

Car Talk

118

(2)

The Gentlemen of Summer

120

(1)

Bodies Beautiful

121

(2)

Golf in the Land of the Free

123

(5)

The Vineyard Remembered

128

(2)

The Sun the Other Way Around

130

(3)

The Cold

133

(6)

Matter under Review

Introductions

To ``The Seducer's Diary,'' a chapter of Either/Or

139

(5)

To The Complete Shorter Fiction

144

(21)

Herman Melville

To The Age of Innocence

165

(5)

Edith Wharton

To Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green

170

(8)

To The Best American Short Stories 1984

178

(9)

To Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews

187

(7)

George Plimpton

To Writers on Writers

194

(2)

Graham Tarrant

To Heroes and Anti-Heroes, photographs by the Magnum Cooperative

196

(6)

To The Art of Mickey Mouse

202

(8)

Craig Yoe

Janet Morra-Yoe

To My Well-Balanced Life on a Wooden Leg

210

(4)

Al Capp

American Past Masters

Reworking Wharton

214

(17)

The Key-People

231

(11)

Laughter from the Yokels

242

(8)

Stevens as Dutchman

250

(2)

Wilson as Cape Codder

252

(8)

The Critic in Winter

260

(8)

An Ohio Runaway

268

(1)

Happiness, How Sad

268

(11)

Cheever on the Rocks

279

(8)

Sirin's Sixty-Five Shimmering Short Stories

287

(4)

North American Contemporaries

Recruiting Raw Nerves

291

(8)

Doctorpoe

299

(1)

Excellent Humbug

299

(6)

The Good Book as Cookbook

305

(6)

Him and Who?

311

(1)

Mayhem at the Hospital

312

(2)

Tummy Trouble in Tinseltown

314

(3)

Soap and Death in America

317

(3)

Awriiiighhhhhhhht!

320

(5)

Stones into Bread

325

(6)

Barney Looks Back

331

(3)

People Fits

334

(4)

Overseas

Mandarins

338

(6)

Proust Died for You

344

(2)

Camus Made New

346

(1)

Omniumgatherum

347

(1)

Mans Is an Island

348

(4)

Muriel Goes to the Movies

352

(3)

God Save Ingushetia

355

(3)

``Live'' Spelled Backwards

358

(5)

On the Edge of the Post-Human

363

(2)

Nightmares and Daymares

365

(1)

Undelivered Remarks upon Awarding the 1992 GPA Book Award in Dublin

366

(4)

Idle Thoughts of a Toiling Tiler

370

(1)

Dark Walker

371

(1)

Angels in Holland

371

(3)

Vagueness on Wheels, Dust on a Skirt

374

(6)

Life Was Elsewhere

380

(6)

Of Sickened Times

386

(8)

Gender Benders

394

(3)

Other contents

A Woman's Continent

397

(8)

A Heavy World

405

(4)

Between Montparnasse and Mt. Pelee

409

(2)

Nobody Gets Away with Everything

411

(4)

Shadows and Gardens

415

(5)

Mountain Miseries

420

(5)

Two Anglo-Indian Novels

425

(7)

A Note on Narayan

432

(2)

Medleys

Glasnost, Honne, and Conquistadores

434

(8)

Posthumous Output

442

(11)

Novel Thoughts

453

(11)

Elusive Evil

464

(17)

Biographies

The Properties of Things

481

(8)

Such a Sucker as Me

489

(10)

Man of Secrets

499

(10)

Not Quite Adult

509

(7)

Large for Her Years

516

(8)

Cubism's Marketeer

524

(6)

Smiling Bob

530

(8)

This Side of Coherence

538

(14)

The Man Within

552

(9)

Shirley Temple Regina

561

(10)

Things as They Are

An Undeciphered Residue

571

(7)

At the Hairy Edge of the Possible

578

(8)

Things, Things

586

(5)

Box Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar Code

591

(4)

The Flamingo-Pink Decade

595

(3)

The Liberation of the Legs

598

(5)

She's Got Personality

603

(7)

Among Canines

610

(1)

Fine Points

611

(10)

Oh, It Was Sad

621

(11)

2000, Here We Come

632

(9)

Visible Matter

Movies

The Old Movie Houses

641

(3)

Samson and Delilah and Me

644

(1)

Legendary Lana

645

(11)

M.M. in Brief

656

(2)

The Vargas Girl

658

(2)

Genial, Kinetic Gene Kelly

660

(7)

Photos

The Domestic Camera

667

(4)

A Bookish Boy

671

(3)

An Ecstatic State

674

(2)

A Woman's Burden

676

(1)

Descent of an Image

677

(4)

Introduction to The Writer's Desk

681

(3)

Jill Krementz

Introduction to The First Picture Book--Everyday Things for Babies

684

(8)

Mary Steichen Calderone

Edward Steichen

Facing Death

692

(4)

Nadar's Swift Tact

696

(7)

Art

Fast Art

703

(5)

The Revealed and the Concealed

708

(8)

Fun Furniture

716

(5)

Acts of Seeing

721

(4)

Big, Bright, and Bendayed

725

(6)

A Case of Monumentality

731

(2)

Verminous Pedestrians and Car-Tormented Streets

733

(7)

Funny Faces

740

(9)

The Sistine Chapel Ceiling

749

(1)

The Frick

750

(7)

Personal Matters

Updike and I

757

(1)

Me and My Books

758

(4)

The Short Story and I

762

(5)

Introduction to Self-Selected Stories

767

(3)

Foreword to Love Factories

770

(3)

Foreword to ``Brother Grasshopper''

773

(1)

Note on ``A Sandstone Farmhouse''

774

(1)

Note on ``Playing with Dynamite''

775

(1)

Foreword to ``The Women Who Got Away''

776

(1)

Note on ``My Father on the Verge of Disgrace''

776

(1)

Karl shapiro

776

(3)

Three New Yorker Stalwarts (William Shawn, William Maxwell, Brendan Gill)

779

(8)

Note for an Exhibit of New Yorker Cartoons

787

(1)

My Cartooning

787

(3)

Cartoon Magic

790

(7)

Christmas Cards

797

(2)

A Childhood Transgression

799

(2)

Remembering Pearl Harbor

801

(2)

Reflections on Radio

803

(1)

Remembering Reading, Pa.

804

(1)

An Hour of the Day

805

(1)

Home in New England

805

(2)

Introduction to Concerts at Castle Hill

807

(3)

Accepting the Bobst Award

810

(1)

Foreword to John Updike: A Bibliography

811

(2)

Accepting the National Book Critics Circle Award

813

(2)

Accepting the Howells Medal

815

(1)

Introduction to the Easton Press Edition of the Rabbit Novels

816

(5)

Henry Bech Interviews Updike

821

(4)

``Special Message'' for the Franklin Library Edition of Memories of the Ford Administration

825

(2)

``Special Message'' for the Franklin Library Edition of Brazil

827

(3)

``Special Message'' for the Franklin Library Edition of In the Beauty of the Lilies

830

(2)

``Special Message'' for the Franklin Library Edition of Toward the End of Time

832

(2)

Two Belated ``Talk of the Town'' Stories (``TV in NYC,'' ``Amazon.com'')

834

(4)

Foreword to the French translation of Facing Nature

838

(2)

Humor These Days

840

(1)

An Answer to a Usual Question

841

(1)

Books That Chanted My Life

842

(1)

Five Remembered Moments of Reading Bliss

843

(1)

Remembering Reading Don Quixote

844

(2)

The Ten Greatest Works of Literature, 1001-2000

846

(4)

Accepting the Campion Medal

850

Remarks on Religion and Contemporary Literature

848

(5)

Accepting the National Book Foundational Medal

853

(4)

Index

857

"More matter, with less art," Queen Gertrude advises Polonius; she sounds like a modern magazine editor. The appetite in the print trade is presently for real stuff -- the dirt, the poop, the nitty-gritty -- and not for the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction. A writer is almost never asked to write a story, let alone a poem; instead he or she is invited to pen introductions, reviews, and personal essays, preferably indiscreet. (Pen them, then fax them. Instant modemed communication and rapidly overlapping semes are à la mode.) Human curiosity, the abettor and stimulant of the fiction surge between Robinson Crusoe's adventures and Constance Chatterley's, has become ever more literal-minded and impatient with the proxies of the imagination. Present taste runs to the down-home divulgences of the talk show -- psychotherapeutic confession turned into public circus -- and to investigative journalism that, like so many heat-seeking missiles, seeks out the intimate truths, the very genitalia, of Presidents and princesses. It is as if, here at the end of a millennium, time is too precious to waste on anything but such central, perennially urgent data. And so it has come to pass that, in the 1990s, as I turned sixty and then reached sixty-two (senior discount at the movies!) and then passed retirement age, instead of devoting myself wholly to the elaboration of a few final theorems and dreams couched in the gauzy genres of make-believe, I have cranked out, in response to many a plausible request, the mass of more or less factual matter, of assorted prose, which Knopf has herewith heroically, indulgently printed and bound, my fifth such collection and -- dare we hope? -- my last.

In this terminal decade the editor of my favorite magazine, The New Yorker, became Tina Brown. It has been my bewildering professional experience to see the editors of that revered journal go from being much older, wiser heads, gray and authoritative, with a shamanistic mystique, to being all -- with the friendly exception of Roger Angell -- much younger than I, young enough in most cases to be my sons and daughters, with an adult child's willful and mysterious fondness for loud music, late nights, unheard-of celebrities, and electronic innovation. However, Ms. Brown's demeanor toward me, during her tenure, was engagingly benign, and I tried, albeit somewhat arthritically, to dance to her tune -- contributing, for instance, to the back-page "Shouts and Murmurs" which she revived from the days of Alexander Woollcott, and answering her call to write about Lana Turner and Gene Kelly, whose videos I was nostalgically happy to view. The magazine's books department passed, through a flurry of interim managers, from the relaxed custody of the late, gravel-voiced Edith Oliver to the more scholastic, tremulously sensitive care of Henry Finder. The kind of books, mostly fiction from Europe and other exotic realms, that I used to be assigned for review yielded to meatier fare, like biographies of such imposing figures as Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth II, and (my last assignment before Ms. Brown's abrupt departure for even greener pastures) Helen Keller. These august subjects subtended areas of knowledge shadowy to me, but the late William Shawn -- whose blessed memory has itself recently undergone some biographical elaboration -- made it a principle not to assign books to specialists in the field, so I was already habituated, as a reviewer, to being at sea and steering by starlight. Also, on their own intellectual initiative, the new editors composed, in the hope that I might become a Critic at Large, a few bouquets of related titles for me to admire and address; in this volume's section "Medleys," the first two conjunctions were my idea, and the next two theirs. Presciently, they had me tackle the Titanic a year before the movie swept all before it. Another ambitious assignment, on Edith Wharton and her cinematic spinoffs, took me uneasily into territory already thoroughly patrolled by Anthony Lane. He and I bumped heads in the dark of a midtown screening room and I beat a quick retreat.

Though The New Yorker has always been scrupulously, tirelessly edited, requests to write to a certain specified length and on a certain timely topic much less obtruded upon a writer's consciousness in the days when William Shawn sustained the editorial illusion of a full and ghostly freedom. Reviews were allowed to run until the reviewer felt depleted; now one aims at a shorter length of nine hundred words or a much longer of around three thousand. Snappy or expansive, take your pick. My reviewing habit, hard to break, was to quote extensively; just as the impossibly ideal map would be the same size as the territory mapped, the ideal review would quote the book in its entirety, without comment. In a strange way, the passing of the Cold War has made it harder to frame a literary opinion; the polarities of right versus left and red versus free lent a tension to aesthetic questions miles removed from the Manichaean global struggle. Fiction from the Communist world was inevitably considered from a political angle, but that of Europe and the Americas also crackled with miniature versions of the global clash, the debate, carried on country by country, between Marx and Adam Smith on how one should live. Economic realities, in the form of declining ad revenues, had at last overtaken The New Yorker, which for so long seemed exempt from the crasser considerations. Her model for renovation, Tina Brown let it be known, was the magazine edited by Harold Ross -- a peppier, saucier, and succincter publication that proclaimed itself not for the old lady from Dubuque. The old lady from Dubuque had become, over the years, one of the faithful subscribers, and then she got doddery. That a doddery contributor like myself might still have a part to play in the redesigned, more sharply angled pages was a comforting thought. I fell in love with the magazine as a child, from what seemed an immense distance. Appearing under the same Rea Irvin-designed title-type and department logos as White and Thurber and Cheever and those magical cartoons was for me a dream come true. It still is.

Excerpted from More Matter: Essays and Criticism by John Updike All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.